My view on Tabletop Games, home of the JTRPodcast

Gameday First Play – Dark Moon

The Noguchi Masaki interplanetary mining corporation welcomes you to its outpost on Titan, the dark moon of Saturn! You will be joining an experienced crew of miners, technicians, and adventurous souls who live to experience all the wonders that our solar system has to offer. Purpose, loyalty, camaraderie, friendship, and sacrifice all await you as a new and valued member of the Noguchi Masaki family!

I’ve played this twice as after the first game we found out a rule was being played wrong… an important rule so I felt it only fair to wait.

You’re trying to complete 3 missions and a final mission without the space station falling apart. Obviously the infected are trying to kill you all.

You get a role card with an ability and a card saying if you’re infected or not. In the first game I was, the second game I wasn’t.

You also get a matching shield to roll your dice behind.

On your turn you do 4 things…

First you draw from the pool of a available dice up to your die limit, which is generally 4.

Then you perform an action…

You can try and ‘Repair’ part of the base by rolling 3 dice and submitting 2 positive numbers. The dice have more negative sides than positive so it’s not that easy. As the roll is hidden you can, as the infected, fail this task and just claim innocence.

You can ‘Lone Wolf’ one of the main missions to try and get a cube on it. Again, you roll 3 submit 2 positives if you can.

You can ‘Issue an Order’ to let another player either get 2 dice or take 2 actions.

If you think someone may be infected you can ‘Call a Vote’ on someone with everyone else simultaneously revealing a die in their hand. Black is a vote for uninfected, Red for infected. If they are quarantined they can only hold 2 dice.

If you’re not quarantined and are Infected, you can ‘Reveal’. You flip over your card, change your screen to an Infected one and activate the ability on your Infected card. Then you roll a die, on a plus result you activate it again.

After your action you draw 2 event cards, discard one face down and play the other face up.

Some just make something happen in the game which is mostly negative while others require all players to choose to submit dice….

It will have a target number and a penalty. Players need to reach the target number with dice… but all players choose if you are going to submit dice or not BEFORE any dice are rolled… and you have to submit at least 1 if you’re in.

So if the target is 6 and you have 7 on your turn and you’re last to go… If you’re in, you have to submit a die. Remember the dice are weighted negatively so you could fail it for everyone by accident… or maybe you wanted to?

It’s nice to have a hidden role game like this, where you’re forced to play against yourselves at times (a la BattleStar Galactica and Dead of Winter) that only takes 60 minutes to play.

It’s very simple to play and not easy for the Infected to mess up which is a bonus.

I’m looking forward to playing it again as the Infected with corrected rules 🙂